


You've Got (My) Mail

by kristophine



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, M/M, Science Boyfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-18 00:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5890483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristophine/pseuds/kristophine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Papers littered the floor in front of the stuffed-full mailbox as soon as he managed to get the little key to turn.</p>
<p>Bruce swore under his breath while he bent down to get them; his bag swung off his shoulder and smacked him in the leg, and he swore again. Physics journals—two of them—and junk mail, great, and a huge swirling crest announced the letter from the alumni association trying to convince him to fork over some money.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Got (My) Mail

**Author's Note:**

> This once again exists because meliora and I got to texting about romantic comedy AUs of science boyfriends. She beta'd this for me, and as usual, she's the finish carpenter of these works; smoothing them down, making them nicer.

Papers littered the floor in front of the stuffed-full mailbox as soon as he managed to get the little key to turn.

Bruce swore under his breath while he bent down to get them; his bag swung off his shoulder and smacked him in the leg, and he swore again. Physics journals—two of them—and junk mail, great, and a huge swirling crest announced the letter from the alumni association trying to convince him to fork over some money.

The stairs smelled a little like lemons and bleach on his way up to his apartment. Light poured in the windows, but didn’t warm the place. He dropped the journals on the table in the hall as he walked in, and then he got down to the messy business of grading papers. Graduate students might be better than undergrads, but not by much, which just made them more unbearable.

 

It was three days later before he had a chance to even look at the journals, flipping grimly through them over breakfast, and it was a testament to his state of mind that he made it halfway through _The International Journal of Solid-State Computing and Robotics_ before realizing it wasn’t one he subscribed to.

He turned it over, squinting down at the address label. _Anthony Stark,_ with no apartment number but their street address. Well, the mailman was used to stuffing the physics journals—thick and ugly, shiny white covers with black text and whatever eye-gougingly awful late-90s graphics they’d managed to get for the cover this time—into his box. No wonder he’d put this journal in with the rest.

He set it aside. He’d leave it out for Stark soon.

 

The next piece of mail came five days later, and this time it wasn’t a physics journal; it was an invitation to a trade show.

Bruce frowned at the gaudy flyer. _Come To Techno Expo 4!_ it shrieked in neon green text with 3D effects that looked like a middle school student had been turned loose in Photoshop.

Stark probably wouldn’t even want that one, but it went on top of the journal, sitting next to the front door. He’d remember it soon.

Techno Expo was—wasn’t that a robotics fair? That made sense. _Stark must be working on integrating quantum-state computing with_ —but of course, if he was doing that, he’d need to—no, Bruce should stop thinking about it, this wasn’t his field. Bruce needed to finish up the DARPA proposal he was working on for a surveillance system using unique radiation signatures. He’d been hinting, heavily, to his contact that this would be useful for finding the caches of nuclear warheads that had been lost during the Cold War. And the hell of it was, he was pretty sure it was going to work, and he was also pretty sure DARPA didn’t give a shit about cleaning up the mess the US and the USSR had left across the world, like a couple of puppies crapping on the carpet. But it could be weaponized, so they’d be interested.

He sat at the bar in the kitchen, laptop up, and started trying to tell DARPA that, yes, they could use this to track insurgents _but wouldn’t it be great_ if they used it to prevent environmental nuclear disasters instead.

 

“Shit,” he said out loud in his lab two days later. He _really_ needed to give that mail back.

 

He was checking his mail a couple of days later when he realized he _still_ needed to return Stark’s mail, and also that he had no way of knowing which mailbox was Stark’s; half the boxes only had apartment numbers on them, and Stark’s name was nowhere to be found. 

There wasn’t anywhere good to set it, either—no table, no corkboard to pin it to.

 

He was starting to get desperate, and like most desperate people, turned to Google.

The results for “Anthony Stark” and then “Anthony Stark new york” and “anthony stark new york robotics” and then, _finally,_ “Tony Stark new york robotics” rolled in, split between academic papers (“The long-term applicability of silicon: End of an era?”; “Considerations in circuitry designed for extreme environmental conditions”) and breathless fluff pieces about charitably donated personalized prosthetics for sad kids and cute two-legged dogs (“Helping Micah See the World”).

He couldn’t help it. He clicked on one of the fluff pieces.

_Shit,_ he thought, staring at the man who was kneeling next to a toddler who had a brand-new shining titanium arm and leg and allegedly a desire to grow up to travel the globe. They were beaming at each other, and the guy was _hot,_ upsettingly hot, the kind of hot that probably actually got the attention of booth babes at things like the Techno Expo, the kind of hot that was going to make returning his mail both a priority and an exercise in fruitless speculation.

Might as well click on the other links, then. “Tony Stark helps Flufferbutter walk again!” Flufferbutter was, it turned out, a golden retriever with soulful eyes and a large chunk of pelvis missing, and Flufferbutter loved fetch, and now Flufferbutter got to play fetch again with a rugged, durable, wheeled set of prosthetics. Tony Stark was chucking a ball for Flufferbutter. Tony Stark was wearing a tight t-shirt and _gleaming in the sun like he was the heir to Fabio_ and Bruce would have closed the tab in disgust if Tony Stark hadn’t been quite so compelling.

“Veterans Visit Stark Labs To Say Thank You” was nauseatingly sweet. There was a guy with a metal arm, grinning as he flexed it, and the text introduced him as _Sergeant James Barnes, who says, “The day I got this arm was the day my husband proposed. That sneaky son of a bitch got the dimensions from Stark so the ring would fit the hand—see?” as he holds it out for inspection. (The ring, of course, is beautiful; his husband collaborated with an artisanal metalworker.)_ And beside them, grinning like a smug cat, was Tony Stark in a tank top under an open white button-up, who was quoted as saying _“Yeah, I’ll take credit for a small piece of their domestic bliss now that the Army has their head out of their ass, isn’t that right, Steve—ow!” as Rogers delivers a fond punch to his bicep, which he rubs in protest._

“You beautiful jackass,” Bruce muttered to the screen, and closed the tabs out of spite.

 

He still couldn’t figure out which apartment was Stark’s. Turned out a public figure and the owner of a small specialized robotics firm wasn’t carelessly posting his apartment number on the Internet.

 

His latest run of experiments needed careful watching, so Bruce was dragging himself in at almost two in the morning a week and a half later when he saw Tony Stark at the mailboxes.

“I think I have your mail,” he said before he could _stop_ himself, vividly aware of his stubble and the dark bags under his eyes and how he’d been wearing that shirt for at least twenty hours, and Stark glanced up in surprise. “I’m 6-D,” Bruce added, like that was going to make him seem like less of a creep.

“Tony Stark,” said Stark, holding out his free hand gingerly with a wad of envelopes clutched in the other. “Although you must know that. And you are?”

“Bruce Banner, sorry, I got a journal and it took me a while to realize it wasn’t one of mine—”

“Yeah, no worries. Just bring it by when you get a chance. I’m in 8-B.”

“Great, will do.”

“Great,” echoed Stark, and they stared at each other for a minute before Bruce shook himself like a dog shaking off water and said, “Okay, yeah, goodnight,” and escaped into the elevator.

_The elevator which Tony would surely also want to—_ he gritted his teeth and held the door as Tony walked on, clearly trying not to smile.

“Well, it’s good to meet neighbors,” said Tony brightly. “So what journals do you get?”

“Just a couple. Physics.”

“Oh, cool. Are you a professor at—?”

“NYU. I do mostly applied—so I get _British Journal of Experimental Physics_ and _Journal of the International Physics Guild._ ”

“That’s great!” The elevator dinged as they reached the 8th floor. “Did you not push your button?” asked Tony.

“Doesn’t look like I did,” said Bruce, grinning past gritted teeth again. “Anyway, have a good night.”

“You, too,” said Tony. He was still smiling like he was trying not to, heading down the hall, as the elevator doors started to close. Bruce hit 6 and waited until they slid shut before he tipped his head back against the side of the elevator and then banged it a couple of times.

 

He probably could have taken the mail right up. He didn’t.

He waited until Saturday afternoon, when he figured even Tony Stark would be home. If he shaved—if he picked out a shirt he’d been told made his eyes look “warm,” it didn’t need to mean anything. Nobody liked to get caught with no game, not in front of a hot neighbor. Hot roboticist neighbor.

The elevator took forever, creaking softly to a stop on 8, and he found 8-B—corner apartment, must have lots of light—and knocked.

“Come in!” somebody yelled, which was—okay.

He walked in to the sounds of Queen and found what looked like an electronics factory had exploded: bits and pieces strewn everywhere, a minefield, a mess, and in one corner hunched over a table that had probably been sold under the delusion that humans would eat dinner off it at some point was Tony Stark, in a worn thin white t-shirt and gray sweatpants, just putting the finishing touches on soldering a circuit.

Without looking up, Tony said, “Hey, could you hand me the crystal adaptor? It’s—”

Bruce handed it to him wordlessly, and Tony made a soft noise of approval as he brought it into the circuit.

“I thought Stark Industries had actual lab space somewhere,” Bruce said dryly.

“Well, we do, but you know, life is short, do what you love, and when I realized I was never _here_ even though I was _paying_ for it I thought, what the hell, I’ll just bring a little work home, and next thing you know—”

“You’ve got the Elephant Graveyard here.”

“Har har, hand me the—”

“You’re going to use that? In that circuit?”

“I didn’t even tell you—”

“Yeah, but I’m guessing you wanted the twin pair crystal piece, am I right?”

“You’re right, but you want to tell me why you think it’s a bad idea?”

“Not a _bad_ idea, just not the _best_ idea. You could replace it with the triplet beryllium and it would—”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I see what you’re saying. Okay, give me that. And sit down, you’re helpful.”

Bruce stepped carefully over the mess and cleared some of it off a chair at the dining table, and set the mail on the floor next to him, and by the time it was getting dark out Tony was satisfied with the adjustment he’d made to the robot’s brain, _88-B_ printed on its clean white shell.

“Why 88-B?” Bruce asked, propping his chin on one hand.

“Because I’m in 8-B, and this is the first thing I made here, and—”

“Ah, so you’re sentimental.”

Tony laughed. “You got me.”

“You should stretch eventually or your shoulders are going to freeze like that.”

“Damn, you’re not wrong.” Tony sighed, setting down the tweezers and the magnifying glass. He raised his arms over his head and stretched, luxuriously, and Bruce’s brain started tripping over itself trying simultaneously to stare and pretend he wasn’t staring. _He has abs. This world is unfair._ Tony dropped his arms and sighed, rolling his shoulders. “That’s better. You want some dinner?”

“I don’t want to b—”

“It’s no bother, I was going to order some Thai. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t try to cook for you.”

“If you’re s—”

“Of course I’m sure. Look, are you vegetarian? How do you feel about _som tam?_ ”

“I’m in favor. And yeah, I mostly eat vegetarian. I’ll make an exception for a really special occasion.”

“Like what?” asked Tony, raising an eyebrow as he snagged the menu off his fridge.

“Weddings. Festivals. I know it when I see it.”

“You go to a lot of festivals?”

“I was in Calcutta for a while. I got to try some things I never did back here.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tony turned his chin as he started to order, rapid-fire, and in a matter of seconds he’d hung up. “That’s cool. Were you finding yourself?”

“No, maybe I should have tried. I was working with a research team. They had some Microsoft funding.”

“God, that’s right, that weird city thing.”

“Company town. We weren’t there, but close enough.”

“So it’s been my research all day,” said Tony, waving at the room. “What’s yours on? I want details. Get juicy.”

Bruce chuckled, and he was partway through his (confidential, but what the hell) DARPA proposal when the food got there. Tony just pushed some of the parts away from the corner of the table where they’d both pulled up chairs, and they sat so close their knees almost touched as they ate. Tony liked to gesture with his fork while he talked, and he laughed a lot, and he toasted Bruce with a sake—“I know,” he said, “I’m ruining the culinary experience, you want one?” and after a couple of glasses, Bruce was feeling warm, full of food and liquor and a glow that felt traitorously good.

He cracked his neck, and Tony’s eyes tracked it; Tony said, “Are you still running that experiment?”

“Yeah, I have to check it in the morning at six.”

“Crap, it’s ten. You should get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” said Bruce, and he smiled at Tony. It felt too soft, too warm. But Tony just smiled back.

“Come on over anytime,” Tony said. “I could use the help.”

“Will do,” said Bruce, and when Tony walked him to the door there was a moment where he wondered—should he go in for—was this a goodnight kiss situation? But he just smiled and said, “Good night,” and Tony nodded, light from the table lamp limning his skin, before closing the door.

 

Natasha said, poking the laser, “You should have done it.”

“I don’t know, I don’t even know if he’s—”

“He is. _I_ know.”

“I would ask _how_ you know but I’m afraid you’d tell me.”

The little Russian physicist snorted, pulling her protective eyewear on. “Gear up, Dr. Banner,” she said, barely giving Bruce time to pull his goggles on before hitting the switch. There was a _bang_ that had him on edge, and a huge burst of steam, and she was humming softly to herself in approval, leaning forward to examine the results.

“You think DARPA will come through on this one?” she asked.

“I’m hoping. I never know.”

“I think they will. They want those nukes found as badly as Russia.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for.”

“Go to his place again,” she said, resetting the test apparatus. “Tell him you work with me.”

“Wait, do you _know_ Tony?”

“He knows of me.”

“How? Did you try to seduce him into giving up secrets to Mother Russia?”

“If I had, I would have succeeded.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Just because my days of seducing physicists for state secrets are over doesn’t mean I have to be modest about my skill set.” She cocked her head to one side, and for a minute her whole posture changed; even with the lab coat and the beat-up sneakers and her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, she suddenly looking meltingly feminine, eminently desirable. Bruce could feel his eyes widening, and she burst out laughing at the look on his face.

“Wait, _were_ you a spy?” he asked incredulously.

“As if I’d tell you,” she said fondly. “Fire in the hole.”

The crackle of the target blowing covered up his outraged squawk.

 

He was going to try to play it cool and wait at least a day before he went back. He only managed because Natasha’s calculations suggested they could blow up a water cooler and he was a betting man.

 

Natasha was right, as it turned out, and it was worth the Dean’s suspicious glare the next time he passed Bruce in the hallway.

 

He got home late, and just took a shower before collapsing into bed. And the next morning he had to lecture, which was excruciating. He liked his grad students, he did. They were busy, bright, motivated self-starters. It _wasn’t his fault they kept crying._

“It’s your fault,” said Natasha dryly.

And after that there was one fire after another—funding, a conference deadline, a shaking, crying graduate student who needed help with an application, and one memorable incident with another student who hadn’t properly calibrated the target apparatus and “ _This is why I put up the SIGN, Khan,”_ he found himself bellowing at the top of his lungs as she scrabbled to get the sprinklers to turn off.

 

So it was Friday night before he found himself in front of 8-B again, and this time he was carrying a fairly nice beaujolais and a container of take-out from the French place down the street. No garlic.

He knocked, feeling off-balance, but when the door opened Tony was in front of him, grinning.

“Good timing,” he said, “I got home about twenty minutes ago and I was just going to get started on dinner.”

Bruce held up the bag in one hand and the wine in the other. “Got a corkscrew?”

“Yeah, God, _somewhere_ in here, let me just—okay, I think it’s in—no, you know what, I cannibalized that one for—88-B, get over here.”

The robot picked up all eight of its feet daintily and made its way through the mess to reach Tony, and then, when he said, “Corkscrew?” it beeped for a minute before extending the tool from a recessed panel. Tony gave it a fond pat and it beeped again.

“That thing is adorable,” said Bruce, staring at it.

“Shh, it can hear you,” said Tony, sliding the corkscrew back into the panel and finding a couple of wineglasses in a cupboard. He poured with a flourish and said, “Wait, shit, do I have forks?”

Bruce laughed and held up the plastic ones that came with the food.

“Good, we’re classy as fuck. Look, I even have a space pre-cleared on the table.”

They got to eating and talking—Tony _loved_ the water cooler story and laughed so hard he cried at Kamala’s misadventures, “I swear to God,” said Bruce, “she’s _so smart_ but sometimes she just goes off half-cocked,”—and somewhere around the second glass of wine Bruce said, “One of my colleagues told me you might know her. Natasha Romanoff?”

Tony choked on his wine and Bruce leaned forward in alarm, but Tony waved him off with one hand. “I’m good, I’m good,” he said. “You work with _Nat?_ ”

“Yeah, do you know her?”

“She—okay, I don’t level accusations of corporate espionage lightly, but she showed up at Stark Industries once with a couple of friends and I swear she texted me my own pictures the next day. She must have cloned my phone.”

“I’m not sure that counts as corporate espionage. What kind of pictures?” asked Bruce, raising his eyebrows.

“That was the hell of it, they weren’t even dirty! I was planning a surprise for Bucky and Steve—friends of mine—and she said she wanted in. I only met her at their reception after that.”

“Wait, is this the poor wounded veteran you made an arm for?”

“Is that how you knew me? I wondered. Yeah, Bucky is the one with the arm. I got to be friends with them while I was working on it and for their reception I was going to hire a band for a surprise.”

“Do I want to know what band?”

“Well, Natasha told me _my_ idea was stupid and she found some obscure musician they were both apparently in _love_ with and they looked like the sappiest, happiest idiots in the world for their first dance, so she was right.”

“Sounds like a success.”

Tony leaned back, smiling a little, wine glass in one hand and the other tapping out a quiet rhythm on the table. “It was,” he said. “You never saw a better wedding. Those guys. They’re the biggest nerds in love. Although Bucky would punch you if you said it.”

“Speaking from experience?” Bruce drawled.

“Ha! No, I knew better. But Steve’s a slippery bastard. Sharp as a fox. You should meet them, I feel like they’re your kind of people.” Tony took a quick sip of wine.

“Yeah,” said Bruce, smiling slowly at him, “they probably are.”

“So,” said Tony, looking down, free hand fiddling with a napkin, “I, uh, look, there’s no wrong answer to this, but I was wondering if this is a da—”

“If you’re on board.”

“You never let me finish.”

“Oh, but I _could,_ ” said Bruce, barely keeping a straight face, and Tony burst into explosive laughter.

Rubbing his cheek, Tony said, “You’re such a—” but he cut himself off, that time, leaning in for a kiss.

 

Later, Tony said, “I was in Afghanistan for a business trip. IED went off. Still traumatized.”

Bruce was moving his hand slowly over Tony’s chest, feeling his heartbeat. “I went to India because I wanted to off myself.”

“Secrets time,” said Tony, “sharing is good,” and Bruce leaned in and kissed him right where his jaw was clenching, and said,

“Yeah, it is. It really is.”

“Do you need to get back to the lab early?”

“Not unless I need an excuse to leave.”

“Oh, _hell_ , no. I was actually thinking I could probably give you some excuses to stay.”

“I like that,” said Bruce, and slid his hand down.

 

Steve grinned at him when they met over lunch and said, “So you’re 6-D!”

“Yeah,” said Bruce.

“This is my husband, Bucky.”

“Good to meet you,” said Barnes, sticking out his right hand. Bruce shook it.

“I get the feeling I’m auditioning here,” he said, dryly. Tony was off on a phone call, _two seconds, I swear._

“Oh, I think you got the part,” said Steve. “Tony hasn’t shut up about you since you stole his mail.”

“I did not—”

“I’m sure it was an honest mistake.” Steve smirked, ruthless. “But a happy accident.”

“Yeah,” said Bruce, “yeah, it was that.” Tony slid into the chair next to him.

“What I’d miss, babe? Anything important?”

“Just Rogers slinging shit,” said Barnes. 

“So just the usual,” said Tony, and his eyes were bright, laughing, and Bruce watched him in the light pouring in around them, and he thought, _you know, this is good_.


End file.
